Page 2 of Delivered and Devoured
“I did say that, didn’t I? Well. Sit, lovey. Anywhere. Mind Maurice.”
Maurice, it turns out, is a stuffed animal of indeterminate species perched on a desk that has not yet been claimed. Above me, a cat’s-cradle of fairy lights drifts across mismatched ceiling tiles. Behind Flossie, mugs hang from hooks: I’M NOT BOSSY, I’M THE BOSS, LIVE LAUGH LITIGATE, one in a language I don’t read with what looks like a tiny embroidered explosion under the handle. The chair I lower myself into creaks in a register I refuse to acknowledge.
She complimented my voice. Sit up straight. Hands. What do I do with hands? On the lap. No, she’ll think I’m sitting on them. Knees. On the knees. Casually. Do not look casual on the knees.
A mug lands in front of me. Chipped rim. The right temperature.
“Tea before we start,” Flossie says. She is already sitting, notebook open, pen poised. Brown eyes. Cardigan the color of old butter. Fourpens stuck in various places about her person. “I’m doing all my interviews over a brew. You’ll find I do most things over a brew.”
“In case nobody’s told you the long version,” she says, “we take cases nobody else will. Things that have gone missing in ways that don’t make sense. People who walked off a station they shouldn’t have been able to walk off. Cargo that arrives without the courier who was carrying it. The official lines won’t touch any of it. We will. Mother sends us a few high-priority cases which come across her desk, and sometimes people find us. That’s the whole pitch.”
“And — sorry, Mother is —”
“Mother Morrison runs OOPS. Orion Outpost Postal Service. Couriers,” Flossie says, in a tone that suggests she has had to explain this several times this week. “Largest independent postal network this side of the belt. Ferries everything from a wedding ring across two stations to a family of refugees across a war. If something needs to get from A to B and you can’t trust the official lines, you call Mother. She has been doing this for twenty-three years. She and I have an arrangement.”
“An arrangement.”
“She finds the things her couriers cannot, in good conscience, deliver. She sends them to me. I find what she could not. We split the difficult work. It is a recent arrangement. I am still grateful she helps us at all since I left OOPS as a courier.”
“That’s — that’s very —”
“Sweet of her, yes. I think so too. She would die before admitting it. Drink your tea, lovey. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
“All your —”
“You’re the first one I’ve sat down with, lovey. We’ve been open for three weeks and four days. Don’t quote me on that. The bunting hasn’t gone up yet.”
Three weeks and four days. The dent is three weeks and four days old. The handwritten sign is three weeks and four days old. They are making this up as they go, and I am one of the first through the door, and the chair I am sitting in might not yet be a chair; it might be a piece of evidence in someone’s lawsuit.
“SPROUT,” Flossie adds, “give us a few minutes, would you?”
The amber orb in the corner of the ceiling pulses once. “Of course, Flossie.”
A female head pops up over a partition three desks back, sharp-eyed and delighted. "Oh, I like this one. She apologized to the mop bot. I watched her do it."
"That's Petra," Flossie says, not looking up. "She watches everything. SPROUT helps."
"I assist with nothing of the sort," SPROUT says, in the tone of an orb caught mid-assist.
I keep two hands on the mug because one is shaking and two together is steadier, and I drink. The tea is exactly the right temperature, and I have been here for forty-five seconds, and something clicks into place — the tripwire kind, the kind you notice after you’ve already stepped over it — that this woman knows how to do this. The chipped mug and the right-temperature tea and the small joke with the orb are all part of a rhythm designed, gently, to stop me running out of the building before she has finished writing my name in her notebook. New office or not. First interview or not.
My spine straightens. The mug goes down, so I am holding nothing.
“Right.” Flossie’s pen moves. “Tell me why you applied.”
The application coach said: one sentence. They asked you a question. Answer the question. Do not volunteer.
“I want to do work that — sorry, can I start that again. I want to be useful, and I have spent six years doing jobs that were quiet, and I am very good at quiet jobs, and I would like to try a job that — that isn’t. That matters.” A breath. “I read your postingand I cried. A little. Not in a — not unprofessionally. I just. The bit about the cases nobody else takes. That bit.”
That was too many sentences. I said that I cried. WHY DID I SAY I CRIED?
The pen does not pause. Flossie’s eyes do not lift.
“That’s a good answer.”
A small noise comes out of me that is not, technically, a word.
“What I’d like to know about now is —”
